Smart missiles in the Gulf War (first one)

Old-Salt

I was having a discussion today with an Aeronautical Engineer.
We were discussion, flight and planes, and stealth aircraft and the like, which he then proceeded to talk about smart missiles.

He told me that he once worked with a guy who served with the RAF during the Gulf War, who told him this story.
That during the fighting in Kuwait the RAF decided there was a particular APC in a built up area that needed to be destroyed.
So the RAF fired some sort of "smart missile" to destroy this APC, this missle was so advanced that it flew down the middle of a street surrounded by buildings for some distance, at the end of the street it went straight through a car parked on the side of the road (through the rear window), not exploding and carried on the destroy the APC.
And supposedly it was a common sight in the war to see "smart missiles" flying through the streets of the towns.

I reckon its BS.
I know they had many guided bombs and missiles then some of which would be capable of this story.
But would I be right in thinking that missiles in a built up area would be inclined to come down on the target from a high angle, not fly through the streets to hit a target?

LE

War Hero

I observed cruise missiles pretty much doing this on Granby. They were flying off GPS programmed routes to the targets which had them flying above building height until their terminal approach. These routes tended to use visible map features such as prominent road junctions as IPs. So yes, in essence the story is true.

LE

in GWI the only air to ground guided weapons the RAF posessed were Paveway LGB's - with a right abortion of a designation set up that could only be provided by an aircraft the Tornado was supposed to replace, and ALARM anti-radar missiles.

LGB's fall out of the sky at 45 degrees plus, so won't be travelling through one car to get to another taget, ALARM isn't going to used on an APC unless it had a radar sat on top of it.

worth nothing that all of these weapons are quite big - the LGB's were all (from recall) 500kg+.

'normal' cruise missiles may have followed street plans, but the RAF didn't have any, and they would not have been used to destroy an APC.

LE

I observed cruise missiles pretty much doing this on Granby. They were flying off GPS programmed routes to the targets which had them flying above building height until their terminal approach. These routes tended to use visible map features such as prominent road junctions as IPs. So yes, in essence the story is true.

LE

what the world needs is an enema, make that two - just to give it a sense of purpose.

US electoral democracy is just a structured system of legalised bribery.

a senior Chinese officer has said, all the great nations in the world own aircraft carriers  they are symbols of a great nation. Thats why China has just commissioned its first. By the same token, to opt for a carrier gap of some years is to abandon your responsibilities.

LE

of course it does - apart from wrong weapon, wrong nation firing it, wrong taget and utterly bollocks 'went through the windscreens of a car to get to the APC' claim.

i'm sure it all stands up perfectly well.

the UK did not borrow any US air launched cruise missiles - unless of couse we're to believe that the RAF has a submarine fleet - because the RAF does not, and did not at the time, posess an aircraft large enough to accomodate a Tommahawk ALCM.

LE

Thank God!! NATO pissed away £120 million in Libya by firing them at Toyota pick up carrying ragheads about. It already cost us £208 million to keep the Tornados and Typhoons flying, giving them weapons to drop would have just been silly!

As it is, HMS Triumph fired approx 70 of them..at a cost of near on £1m each!

LE

Thank God!! NATO pissed away £120 million in Libya by firing them at Toyota pick up carrying ragheads about. It already cost us £208 million to keep the Tornados and Typhoons flying, giving them weapons to drop would have just been silly!

As it is, HMS Triumph fired approx 70 of them..at a cost of near on £1m each!

LE

PAVE SPIKE on Buccaneer was supplemented later on, when the MoD turned around to Ferranti Electro-=Optics Division, and asked whether they could take the pre-production prototypes of TIALD off to war. Instead of a single-channel, manually-controlled designator (we had a presentation from one of the Bucc pilots who flew the PAVE SPIKE missions, a couple of years afterwards*), the TIALD was a dual-channel, stabilized, state-of-the-then-art thing.

Bear in mind that this was the prototype kit - built with wire-wrap, finished in a nice gloss white - and only part-way through trials. There was a certain degree of sucking of teeth an prayer to the Gods of Engineering, a spray-can of sand-coloured paint, some black felt-tip pen artwork applied to the pods (they were nicknamed "Sandra" and "Tracey", so those who read Viz can guess the art), and off they went to war. And worked; AIUI, they flew them as a pair so that they had a backup, but they apparently didn't have any mission failures.

They had one of the pods on a plinth at Abbey Wood a few years later, still in sand and felt-tip. Shame about TIALD - post Gulf War, post Cold War, the "wow, this is fantastic kit, thanks for pushing the boat out guys" turned into "errr... we're going to have to delay the production contract, we don't know for how long, we don't know how many we'll want, did we say next year? We meant the year after, sorry if you can't afford to keep on your assembly workers". The factory where they were designed is now a housing estate...

* The other presenter of the evening had been Adjt of an Armd Inf BG in 4 Bde; whenever said RAF chap described the problems of fighting a war from a suite on the 15th floor of the Dhahran Hilton, disco and bar above, you could see him thinking back to a month of shellscrapes and hard routine...

LE

what the world needs is an enema, make that two - just to give it a sense of purpose.

US electoral democracy is just a structured system of legalised bribery.

a senior Chinese officer has said, all the great nations in the world own aircraft carriers  they are symbols of a great nation. Thats why China has just commissioned its first. By the same token, to opt for a carrier gap of some years is to abandon your responsibilities.

LE

Cruises use a combination of: Gps; terrain countour mapping/matching; digital scene matching something or other; Terrain contour matching. GPS was already alive and well at the outset of GW1 its just that the hardware was a tad bulkier with no graphics. I remember procurers being sent to Japan to buy up all the GPS could find in retail electronics shops.

Nowadays hobby rocket nerds have GPS and guidance systems in their toys.